The US Army Research Lab and the Knowledge Engineering Group of the US Army Ordnance Center and School (Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Md.) have developed a visual expert system for diagnostics of the Ml tank's turbine engine. TED (Turbine Engine Diagnostics) is currently delivered on a color laptop PC one support level behind the front lines. Pictures of the engine and graphical representations of the diagnostic process prompt novice and experienced Army mechanics for input or action as they are guided by TED through the correct maintenance procedures. The UKbased Tyne and Wear Development Corp. is developing a virtual reality model of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne as part of that city's redevelopment project. A visualization of the East Quayside area, including landscaping, the road network, buildings, and the Tyne Bridge landmark, is being created as a virtual world.

Foremost Manufacturing Inc. (Union, NJ), a manufacturer of reflectors for lighting fixtures, has adopted a fuzzy logic-based application to produce quotations for customers in less time. The company is using a fuzzy system to produce bids in about 1.5 minutes, compared to an industry average of two weeks. Carnegie Group Inc. (Pittsburgh, PA) has developed a hybrid neural network/expert system for diagnostic situations where signal data and symbolic data must be combined to perform a definitive diagnosis and repair procedure. This technology was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation. Working with experts from Armco Steel (Middletown, OH), Carnegie Group developed a prototype system to diagnose chatter in a coldrolling mill.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Virginia (Richmond, VA) has developed an expert system to classify, evaluate and process medical claims. The system, called MedScreen, reportedly can process up to 500 claims in 45 minutes, an operation that used to take several days to complete. Citibank's Network Development and Operations (Long Island City, NY) has developed an intelligent help subsystem as a diagnostic aid to network operators. This expert system provides context-sensitive help to operators at Citibank's internal telecommunications network control center, assisting the operators by quickly identifying malfunctions and suggesting solutions. IBM (Armonk, NY) and Dragon Systems (Newton, MA) have jointly developed VoiceType, a speech recognition system based on elements of the DragonDictate product, which allows hands-free typing.

The US Army has installed PRIDE (Pulse Radar Intelligent Diagnostic Environment), a diagnostic expert system developed by Carnegie Group (Pittsburgh, PA), in Saudi Arabia in support of Operation Desert Storm. PRIDE is said to be the first diagnostic expert system ever put in the field by the US Army. American Airlines (Dallas, TX) has developed an expert system - Maintenance Operation Control Advisor (MOCA) - to ensure that every Super 80 (DC-9) airplane meets the airline's and the FAA's aircraft maintenance requirements. Nova Technology (Bethesda, MD), a new company founded by Naval Research Center scientist Harold Szu, plans to commercialize neural networks made from high-performance superconductors. Inference (El Segundo, CA) has named Peter Tierney CEO and president.

General Electric's Research and Development Center (Schenectady, NY) has developed an expert system which is being used to increase the speed of design of new jet engines, electric motors, and other complex machines. The system, called Engineous, has been used to improve gas turbine designs, resulting in increased fuel efficiency for jet aircraft engines manufactured by GE. The Expert Sniffer, developed by Network General (Menlo Park, CA), is an expert system-based technology that automatically identifies network problems and recommends solutions to network managers. Software based on this technology will be a standard part of the Sniffer Network Analyzer, targeted initially for Ethernet and Token Ring environments. The objective of this project will be to define a standard execution environment for fuzzy systems.

By David Blanchard Color Tile Inc. (Fort Worth, Tex.), a home improvement retailer, has automated its help desk operations with an expert system. The system has reduced time spent by store personnel on the telephone seeking answers to point-of-sale technical problems, and it allows the help desk analysts to handle a wider range of responsibilities for the company. Traversum AB, a company that specializes in share and stock dealing in the Swedish stock exchange, has developed an intelligent system to advise on how to deal in stocks and shares. The company's "hit rate" of dealing correctly with stocks has reportedly increased from 60% to 90%. IntelliCorp Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), an expert system vendor, and James Martin & Co. (Reston, Va.), a computer-aided software engineering (CASE) consulting group, have launched a field test program for an object-oriented information engineering environment.

As a result of our applications development experiences, we are beginning to use a development methodology that emphasizes early prototype development, incremental refinement of the problem description, use of multiple integrated solution methods, and emphasis on visibility of both the problem-solution process and the explicit description of the problem domain. The benefits of using this hybrid development methodology include natural and explicit knowledge representations, flexible user-system interaction, and powerful explanation facilities through use of interactive graphics. We present an example to motivate our discussion. Workers in AI often express a strong preference for one programming methodology over all others, such as rules (e.g., within an Efficiency seems to depend upon the class of problem chosen. Figure 2. expert need not create a development environment before implementing an AI application system.

If the user is satisfied with the expected consequences, s/he finalizes his(her) decisions. The quality of his(her) decisions are automatically evaluated, and information about the strengths and shortcomings of his(her) decision-making strategy is fed back to him(her). We have used this environment to train and evaluate novice air traffic controllers. Figure 5 shows the two displays of the PMME system. The left-hand side displays the current world and the right-hand side the extrapolated world.

The services and benefits that clients receive are based largely on such reviews and assessments. The failure to perform accurate reviews and assessments in a timely manner can result in a client being denied access to services when they most need them. The typical scenario with regard to case review and assessment in social services situations involves a professional caseworker reviewing a client's file, conducting a phone or in-person interview if necessary, and making an assessment using the information obtained from the review and heuristics developed from experience. The caseworker is generally a professional who possesses expertise in the appropriate field. Some examples of fields where this expertise is found include medicine, mental health, and education.

This article presents a learning agent shell and methodology for building knowledge bases and agents and their innovative application to the development of a critiquing agent for military courses of action, a challenge problem set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's High-Performance Knowledge Bases Program. The learning agent shell includes a general problemsolving engine and a general learning engine for a generic knowledge base structured into two main components: (1) an ontology that defines the concepts from an application domain and (2) a set of task-reduction rules expressed with these concepts. We believe success in this area will have an even greater impact on our society than the development of personal computers. Indeed, if personal computers allowed every person to become a computer user, without the need for special training in computer science, solutions to this AI challenge would allow any such person to become an agent developer. Agent development by typical computer users would lead to a large scale use of computers as personalized intelligent assistants, helping their users in a wide range of tasks.